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Company Formation: Vision, Mission & Hiring

In this session we discuss the importance of Culture, Vision, Mission and how to hire A+ players. They are all related as you'll see in the video.

Culture

Why is it so important to define a culture in the early stages of company formation? Because cultures aren’t something you can easily back into over time; they’re the fertile compounds that foster growth and inspire employees’ actions and behaviors. Cultures are the encoded values that dictate standards of excellence that drive teams to collaborate around shared goals. Unified cultures concentrate energy in powerful ways. By contrast, divided cultures dissipate energy. That’s why cultures should be established early and protected and cultivated over time.

How important is a strong culture? According to prevailing research on the subject, culture directly impacts the top and bottom line and market capitalization. In fact, according to one study, public companies with strong, unified cultures outperform in stock price by 300%. You'll see more about that in the slides below.

Vision, Mission:

As an investor, I almost never consider a deal unless it has a big, compelling vision. There’s an old saying that applies here, which says that if you don’t know where you’re headed, any road will get you there. But as an entrepreneur, it’s not enough to simply call the hill that you want to take; you need to be clear that the hill is big, important and galvanizing as a goal for your team.

Google probably wouldn’t be the company it is today if it simply determined to build a faster search engine. Instead, they defined a vision that was nothing short of indexing all of the world’s information, which would enable all sorts of game-changing applications.

A dichotomy of entrepreneurship is that you’re often expected to have all the answers when, in reality, all you have is a vision and a straw man idea of what’s ahead. That’s OK, because—let’s be honest—nobody knows exactly how their markets will evolve. But, as an entrepreneur, what you can and should have is a vision for a better future that results from your innovations. There's more about the challenge of balancing Vision and Execution to be found here.

Hiring:

In the end ideas are worth very little without people to execute them. Yet every startup I know struggles to find the so called "A+ players" to build their business. In this session we define what A+ really means and share some tools on how to go after that talent using your Culture as a touchstone and Vision and Mission as a lightning rod for their talent, empowering them to succeed and grow with you.

In his fateful pitch to PepsiCo president, John Scully, Steve Jobs famously asked, “Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?”

Leaders that set a big and bold vision are able to more effectively recruit talent.